ABANDONED PROJECTS 

初學者一本就上手 挪威語 & 克文語

初學者一本就上手 挪威語 & 克文語 (Beginner's Norwegian & Kven) was our first attempt to introduce Norwegian and Kven to the Taiwanese general public. Taiwan has a relatively free book market, where anyone can publish their own books. Since there has been a growing interest in many small European languages in Taiwan, we thought it would be a good idea to teach Norwegian and Kven and publish the very first Kven learning material in Mandarin Chinese. However, we felt rather insecure about our linguistic background, as we had learned the languages by ourselves. In addition, we could not find any native speakers to collaborate with us on this project.

Kainun kielen verbihäfti

Kainun kielen verbihäfti was inspired by Finnish verb rection book Tarkista Tästä and Barron's 501 VERB series. Case governance for Kven is an important topic, but it is rarely or hardly mentioned on the Internet.

We have written this book entirely in Kven, and it is currently only half-finished. Our original intention was to cover the conjugation of verbs, including all six verb types, the 100 most commonly used verbs, and their respective constructions. It has been over 3 years since we last worked on this book, and as we review this draft, we acknowledge its incoherence, numerous spelling errors, and inconsistencies. We must admit that we need to revisit each verb type to ensure learners can accurately conjugate every verb using the rules we've compiled. Nevertheless, despite these challenges, this book is the closest it has ever been to completion, and we intend to finish it when we have the time and determination to do so.

Kväänin fraasihäfti

Kväänin Fraasihäfti (Kven Phrsebook) was inspired by many illustrated phrasebooks found in Taiwanese and Japanese book market. This project was eventually abandoned because we weren't able to draw this many illustrations, and so far only a few pages were made.

Infographics

These infographics were supposed to be combined with the phrasebook above as supplements, but later we've decided to post them on Twitter.

Animasjuuni Kvääniksi

My journey of creating Kven-language contents based on animated films began in 2021, when I rewatched the film Tangled and decided to make a Twitter account called 'Disney Kvääni'. Later, I changed the name to 'Animajuuni Kvääniksi' to include animations from other studios as well.

My original idea was to make Kven-subtitled screenshots of the films and provide vocabulary lists, but I soon switched to a comic-style format that was more engaging and fun. I was inspired by the Cinestory Comic series published by Disney, which are comic adaptations of their animated films. However, I realized that making such comics was not only very time-consuming, but also potentially infringing the intellectual property rights of the original creators. To produce many books for minority languages based on different animations, it would require a collaboration between a language regulatory body or a government-run institution and the US-based or UK-based animation studios. This is something that is beyond my scope and ability. Therefore, I decided to stick to using social media and fair use principles, without any commercial or ambitious intentions.